Canadian Railroad Trilogy Gordon Lightfoot

The "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" is a song written, composed, and performed by Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot that describes the building of the trans-Canada Canadian Pacific Railway in the early 1880s.

This song was commissioned from Lightfoot by the CBC for a special broadcast on January 1, 1967, to start Canada's Centennial year. It took him three days to write the work. It appeared on Lightfoot's The Way I Feel album later in the same year along with the song "Crossroads," a shorter song of similar theme. The structure of the song, with a slow tempo section in the middle and faster paced sections at the beginning and end, was patterned more or less opposite to Gibson's and Camp's "Civil War Trilogy," famously recorded by The Limeliters on the 1963 live album Our Men In San Francisco. In the first section, the song picks up speed like a locomotive building up a head of steam.

While Lightfoot's song echoes the optimism of the railroad age, it also chronicles the cost in sweat and blood of building "an iron road runnin' from the sea to the sea." The slow middle section of the song is especially poignant, vividly describing the efforts and sorrows of the nameless and forgotten "navvies," whose manual labour actually built the railway.

Lightfoot re-recorded the track on his 1975 compilation album, Gord's Gold, with full orchestration (arranged by Lee Holdridge). A live version also appears on two of his live albums, first on his 1969 album Sunday Concert and again on the 2012 release All Live, which consists of songs recorded during the live concerts Lightfoot gave at Toronto's Massey Hall between 1998 and 2001.

According to Lightfoot, Pierre Berton said to him, "You know, Gord, you said as much in that song as I said in my book." Berton was referring to his two bestselling books about the building of the railway across Canada, The National Dream and The Last Spike.

In 2001, Gordon Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" was honoured as one of the Canadian MasterWorks by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada.

The song has been covered by John Mellencamp and George Hamilton IV, among others. James Keelaghan performed the song on the Lightfoot tribute album, Beautiful. In the summer of 2004, the song was performed by that year's Canadian Idol Top 6.

Canada celebrates it's 150th anniversary today. It was almost a period of lamentation for me because this is no longer the country I was born in. Political correctness and deeply rooted traitors embedded in government are striving to reinvent the brand to suit their sordid ends.

Primarily they feign loyalty while secretly they sell us out to a one world government enslavement. They have debased our Christian heritage and denegrated the true concepts of freedom.

I've always told my son he'll never know the freedoms I had as a youth. Today the government micromanages as many facets of your life as it can. When I look back at the men and women who truly built this country tears well up in my eyes for they are Canada not the dandies who feign allegiance while they loot the assets, subvert the sovereignty, and insult the people of this fair land.

In true fashion the Roman concept of bread and circuses will denegrate the day as we line up for the age old practice. I'll shun the circus because I know what it truly represents. I will honor the Canadians who toiled before me raising generations and building the land from sea to shining sea. God bless them. They are what should be celebrated.

We were founded on a politically incorrect trade.

Survival determined that we all had to work together without a nanny government legislating it.

Before O Canada our anthem was The Maple Leaf Forever. My grandfather worked for the railroad laying track. He fought for this country in WW2. My grandmothers reared the next generation. My other grandfather taught me the skills I use today to take on the forces of darkness that are the enemies of the people. In that task we strive TO VICTORY!

On this site we have a series called Canada: A Peoples History. Search it out. I can watch it over and over again. It was quite the story.